How to Build a Winning eCommerce Customer Journey Strategy
August 4th, 2025
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Imagine visiting a website to find a pair of shoes for an upcoming event. You have a general idea of what you want, but you’re not quite sure. As you browse, the site immediately greets you with a personalized message that includes your name. It then recommends products based on your past purchases, shows you items that complement your previous buys, and highlights the most relevant options that match your search query. This is the eCommerce customer journey at work. Understanding this concept and how to optimize it through eCommerce personalization is crucial to improving your online store's performance. This blog will offer valuable insights to help you create a seamless, personalized eCommerce customer journey that boosts conversions, increases customer loyalty, and drives long-term revenue growth.
Ground's ecommerce personalization platform can help you achieve your goals by creating a tailored experience for your customers that adapts as their preferences change over time.
Table of Contents
What is the eCommerce Customer Journey?
The ecommerce customer journey is the complete end-to-end experience of a customer, from when they first become aware of the brand via marketing and advertising, to the final purchase. This includes:
Browsing
Product selection
Checkout
Post-purchase support
Understanding and optimizing the ecommerce customer journey helps businesses enhance engagement and increase conversions, as evidenced by the 59% increase in returning shoppers over the past two years.
The Power of Unified Customer Data
Building a clear picture of your customer journey starts with strong first-party data and a unified customer model that creates a single view of your customer across their entire journey, regardless of where it begins or ends. When your customer data lives in separate databases, marketing tools, analytics platforms, and CRM systems, you only see fragments of the journey.
Understanding the Complete Customer Story
A unified data model combines browsing, purchasing, and order information across every sales channel. This gives you a complete view of how customers discover your products, what convinces them to buy, and what brings them back for more. Instead of piecing together different versions of your customer from various tools, you work with one source of truth.
Stages of the eCommerce Customer Journey
Awareness
Awareness is the first stage in any ecommerce customer journey. It starts when a customer’s interest is piqued, or they’re already looking for a product or service to solve a problem they’re currently experiencing. Common customer touchpoints at this stage include social media advertising or word-of-mouth referrals from existing customers. Lead capture turns this initial interest into a direct connection with customers. Retailers pair awareness campaigns with strategic offers like discounts, cash rewards, or loyalty points. You can use the data you collect to power personalized marketing campaigns.
Consideration
A person’s commitment to finding a solution increases as they progress through to the consideration stage of the customer journey. Here, they weigh their options and visit your online store, as well as any competing brands that might serve their needs. Automation helps in the consideration phase. Depending on your commerce platform, you can automate touchpoints like:
Dynamic product recommendations based on browsing history.
Automated email sequences triggered by specific page visits.
Personalized retargeting ads showing recently viewed items.
Smart popups offering assistance based on scroll depth and time on page
Automation also helps throughout the lead-nurturing process. For example, you can send behavior-triggered email campaigns, employ AI chatbots on your website, and send price-drop notifications for items in wishlists.
Acquisition
Acquisition is when a potential customer becomes an actual one through conversion, whether that’s through a purchase on your site or signing up for a subscription or service on your:
Ecommerce store
Marketplace
Retail location
Social media storefront
Checkout is where the customer is made. A seamless and personalized checkout experience can make conversion faster and easier, while building long-term relationships. During this stage, offering trusted payment methods like Shop Pay can significantly influence outcomes. Shop Pay users are 77% more likely to make additional purchases, which supports your acquisition goals.
Customer Service
The ecommerce customer journey doesn’t end once a customer has made their first purchase. Inevitably, customers will need help with their order. Whether they want to initiate a return, understand how the product works, or inquire about discounts on future purchases, customers expect responsive and helpful assistance through their preferred communication channels. Retail brands can offer customer service through multiple touchpoints. Traditional channels like email and phone support are essential, while live chat has become increasingly popular for its convenience.
The Front Line of Support
AI-powered chatbots have become a first line of support, handling common queries 24/7 and directing more complex issues to human agents. These automated solutions can quickly address questions about:
Order status
Return policies
Product information
Loyalty
Loyalty happens when existing customers continue purchasing from your brand. It’s the final stage of the journey, but not the least important. A study from Gorgias shows that despite only accounting for 21% of a brand’s audience, loyal customers contribute 44% of a merchant’s total revenue. Additionally, 59% of orders on the Shop app come from repeat buyers. Aside from initiating another purchase and springing back to an earlier stage in the journey, customer touchpoints that frequently happen at the loyalty stage include leaving a review or recommending the product to a friend.
What is a Customer Journey Map?
An ecommerce customer journey map is a diagram that details how customers engage with your company across various interfaces, including:
Online
Retail
Contact your customer support team
It tells you where users are coming from, how many days or visits it takes them to move from one stage to another, what the goal of the user is in each stage, and how each segment behaves.
Why is the Customer Journey Important?
Do you need to make a customer journey map? What benefits does it bring you? Knowing why it is essential is crucial, as understanding the whole process itself. There are many reasons why it is not only important, but should be an integral part of your ecommerce business.
Efficiency
It can help you streamline the customer experience and journey by identifying if there are too many steps or touchpoints between the customer's start and end points.
Effectiveness
Does the required journey make sense to your customers? Acknowledging that we all do things differently, from how we search to how we navigate a site, creating a process that has a general effectiveness for most is a significant benefit of a customer journey map.
Understanding
Knowing and understanding your customers, how they think, what they need, what they like, and what they don’t like, is another crucial factor in determining how to create the best possible customer journey. This is an area where many organizations fail as they focus more on creating the perfect journey for themselves, rather than their customers.
Setting goals
A good customer journey map can help you identify and set better and more realistic goals. The combination of a human perspective and the complex data you have collected ensures you are more in touch with what makes your business thrive and grow. It also helps you monitor and tweak in real time as you move forward.
Planning
Every business has one eye on the future: new products and services, expansion, etc. Having an accurate customer journey map and understanding it means that you can more accurately focus on those future events.
Reducing pain
Pain points are the bane of any online store and can lose you customers if not identified and remedied. You may be surprised by how many pain points exist once you have completed your journey map. Once you have identified them, you can take action to remove them or to reduce their effects.
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Related Reading
• eCommerce Personalization Tools
• Personalized Shopping Experience
• Best eCommerce Tools
• eCommerce Personalization Examples
How Do You Build Ecommerce Customer Journey Maps?
To create an effective ecommerce customer journey, your map needs complete accuracy. That means ignoring your own biases as an industry expert and viewing the journey from the customer’s perspective. This immersive approach helps you understand their:
Unique goals
Motivations
Pain points
Emotional responses
Going Incognito to Uncover Customer Desires
Start by choosing a product or service your business offers. Then, go incognito. Use various terms to search for the item on search engines and take note of the results. Read any associated material, including:
Reviews
Articles
Blogs
Visit your actual site to view the product there. Take notes on how the various customer touchpoints felt and how the experience of visiting the site unfolded.
Research: Gather Insights from Real Customers
Put together a focus group consisting of your target demographic. Ideally, they won’t know which company has formed this group. Choose one of your products or services and ask the focus group to purchase it online. Observe and record how they see the item, what paths they take, and what outcomes unfold. Once the focus group has finished their exercise, analyze the results to identify any discrepancies between your observations and the customer experience. This exercise helps you gain a more exhaustive overview of touchpoints and interactions on the customer journey.
Understanding: Analyze the Data to Identify Key Touchpoints
Now you better understand how customers interact with your business and how the various touchpoints perform. The next step is to understand what those various actions mean in terms of engagement strategy. Did any touchpoint perform particularly poorly? By analyzing the information you’ve collected, you can see what action you need to take next. You aim to have your ecommerce site performing at an optimum level at every touchpoint identified. Those touchpoints can range from your site to your social media platforms to search engine rankings. They can also include independent touchpoints such as review sites.
Goals and Pain: Identify Customer Motivations and Frustrations
You’ve built a solid foundation for your customer journey map. But it’s more than just identifying the touchpoints and engagements you’ve observed. You also need to understand the customer's goals and the pain points they experience. It can help significantly if you list some of the insights gained from your observation and data collection:
Goals: What is the customer’s ultimate goal(s)? What is it they want to achieve?
Emotional response: What parts of the process make the customer happy? Or what elements make them unhappy or frustrated?
Pain points: What things cause issues for the customer, and would they like to see improved?
Visualization: Simplify and Create a Visual Representation of Your Findings
You should now have enough information to understand the customer's experiences. The problem is that this information is hard to understand, so you want to simplify it and create a visual that is easy to look at and understand. How you format it will depend very much on your specific business model.
A Journey Just for Social Media
You may decide to create more than one visual, especially when you are a larger company and may have different teams working on other areas. For example, if you have a dedicated social media team, you may create a journey map that particularly pertains to:
Social media touchpoints
Pain points Experiences
6 Types of User Data to Create a Customer Journey Map
If you choose to create a customer journey map, you’re already engaging in data-driven marketing. Make your maps as helpful as possible by taking relevant information from a wide range of sources.
1. Website journey data
Website journey data is an essential part of your ecommerce website analysis toolkit. It gives you a high-level overview of how people navigate and interact with your site.
2. Behavior analytics data
Understanding the journeys your visitors take is just the start—behavior analytics dives deeper. It reveals how users interact with each page, from clicks and scrolls to hesitations and rage clicks. These insights help you uncover pain points that might go unnoticed, such as unclear navigation or distracting design elements.
3. Email queries, chat logs, and customer support logs
Your company’s everyday conversations with customers are a gold mine of insights. They reveal what users commonly get frustrated with, what information they need, and how often specific problems occur. Ideally, use a tool like Zendesk or Intercom to categorize and log customer queries and support requests. Then, you can hold regular reviews with your sales and support teams to see how the trends fit into your customer journeys.
4. On-site and email surveys
Asking your customers for feedback is an effective way to understand their experiences at different parts of their journey. In addition to getting subjective, descriptive feedback, surveys also give you quantitative data (like NPS® scores) to support optimization efforts.
5. Funnel analysis
The term ‘funnel’ describes the path ecommerce site visitors take and how it inevitably narrows as some people decide to leave the site or become a customer at the end of their journey.
6. Customer interviews
Having one-on-one discussions with customers is a great way to learn more about their:
Needs
Motivations
Pain points
The Strategic Value of Exit Interviews
You might find it helpful to offer customers an incentive to speak with you, but satisfied customers will often do so for free. Nevertheless, don’t focus solely on happy customers. Performing exit interviews with regular customers who change to another supplier can reveal a weak link in the customer journey.
Related Reading
• How to Improve eCommerce Customer Experience
• Ai Tools for Ecommerce
• B2B eCommerce Personalization
How to Utilize the eCommerce Customer Journey
Once you have connected the dots of the customer journey, you can easily put your marketing pillars where your customers have gathered, and show them how you can simplify their lives. Along with strategizing the marketing goals, you can utilize the customer journey in troubleshooting, business development, supply chain control, etc. Let’s dive into how you can utilize your e-commerce business’s customer journey:
Draw a Sustainable Sequence
Drawing a proper sequence of the customer journey is the first requirement to guide your customers through the process. One wrong turn can ruin the whole journey, causing buyers to forget your brand name. Don’t let your competitors take over your prospects halfway.
Start with problem-solving info
Educate about your brand
Help customers build trust
Clarify the confusion
Recognize the crucial touchpoints
More Than a Number
Your customers don’t have the exact reasons for the same actions. Let’s take cart abandonment as an example. There might be different reasons for this, such as:
Price of one or more products
Crossing the customer’s budget, even if it’s reasonable.
Customers might be waiting for a discount.
Create Touchpoints at Every Stage
Anywhere a customer interacts with your brand is a touchpoint. Seeing an ad, visiting my site, looking at independent reviews, contacting your business to find store locations, and finally making a purchase. All of these are touchpoints. Going back to the five stages of the customer journey we discussed earlier, you need to have touchpoints for each stage.
The Role of Each Touchpoint
Each touchpoint serves a purpose and plays its part in optimizing the overall customer journey. So each touchpoint you create has to fulfill its specific purpose (attracting interest, a quick and uncomplicated checkout process, etc.) Ensuring I have multiple touchpoints that fit their respective stages and work properly is essential.
Create a Bridge to the Touchpoints
Pricing might seem like a canal where reviews and ratings can work like a bridge that helps the buyer reach the purchase point. Like this, buyers need to get motivated in every stage to achieve the ultimate goals.
Build a Commendable Customer Support System
A customer support system is not just a panel to solve users’ problems promptly, but also a hub that silently stores customer pain points and interests. When you make sure your customer support is closer to the customers and has gained their trust, it adds bricks to the road of the customer journey.
Implement Quick Responses
Always offer a bit more help than required. Get feedback from the users. Follow up on the user feedback. Gather value-centric data to implement analysis. Engaging lead generation forms helps you gather user-specific data. When you ensure your customer support is closer to the customers and has gained their trust, it adds bricks to the road of the customer journey.
Eliminate Useless Efforts
The eCommerce customer journey is a big cycle where strategic mistakes might take place. Updated customer journey mapping is a way to identify errors and eliminate them efficiently. If you detect any problem inside the customer journey, you can at least eliminate the wrong strategies, even if you can’t find a perfect solution instantly.
Optimize Your Website for Every Device
It is worth remembering that around half of all internet traffic originates from mobile devices. So if your website performs poorly when accessed from a mobile device, you are alienating half your potential customer base. Optimization is key to offering a good experience to all. It can help to look at great websites that are well optimized, such as Skullcandy, so you can see what is needed. The screenshot below shows how well you can view their products from a mobile device, making online shopping easier for customers. And there are a few factors to take into consideration when optimizing your site:
Manual Checks and Automated Tools for Mobile Readiness
Test your site. Knowing your site works well on mobile devices is crucial. You can do this manually at first, simply by accessing your site via several different devices. Look especially at loading times and how the site looks on a small screen. For more in-depth testing, use Google’s free testing tool.
Web host. Make sure your web host offers the speed and resources required to make your site fast and responsive. A slow and unresponsive website will put customers off. You also want a host that guarantees minimal downtime.
Apps. Consider launching an app to complement your website. They are not as expensive as you think, and they can help boost both sales and engagement.
Find Out Pin-Point Strategies
You don’t need to run a 40-page strategy when you can compress it into a half-page. If you can summarize the points, you can apply a slight change inside the customer touchpoints like a surgeon conducts local anesthesia.
Eliminate Failing Strategies
Find out what gaps the market possesses. Stop focusing on wanderers(not shoppers). Reduce shopping cart abandonment rates. Research the (un) standard buyer persona. Uncommon buyer personas reside in the common ones; study them. Study the feedback, check the oddest answers to the survey questions, and customers’ responses to the call to action.
Identify the Missing Charms
It’s not every case that your projection will work efficiently. If you can’t notice it, you can’t stop it.
Use Proactive Customer Support
Don’t wait for problems to happen and for customers to contact you. Anticipate the issues or questions most likely to occur and provide answers and solutions that will keep your customers happy. Offering proactive customer support has several benefits.
Better customer retention rates
Being proactive means you’re more likely to have happy, loyal customers. Less calls to your support team. By solving problems proactively, customers can see the solutions themselves and thus will make fewer calls to you, freeing up your team to deal with more complicated queries and also reducing waiting times.
More first-time customers
People talk about the good service they receive, and that includes proactive support. When satisfied customers share their experiences, that can lead to new first-time customers. Increased productivity. Proactivity means better communication. And that means your team has more time to listen to and help customers who call and to collect more information and data.
Communication
You are probably already using video and messaging collaboration tools for sales teams, so why not ensure you also have great tools to communicate with customers? Chatbots and AI are great ways of proactively helping your customers find information.
Personalization is Key
It is neither a secret nor a surprise that people like a personal touch, and that is true whether in ‘real life’ or in online shopping and ecommerce marketing. That means going beyond using their name (which you can do with website automation or in marketing emails) and also recognizing their particular interests and buying habits.
Driving Personalization with Automation
Using tactics such as dynamic content marketing, which can customize content according to buying preferences, location, age, gender, etc., means you are offering a personalized approach that can lead to increased sales and better customer retention. Automation and analytics can be the two drivers when it comes to personalizing the customer journey, so use them wisely.
Budget-Friendly Tools for Small Businesses
Smaller businesses may feel overwhelmed by these demands, but with so much technology and automation available on a budget, it is not that difficult to do. Many mobile apps for small business owners can help with factors such as communications and social media posting, so see what tools can both help you and save money that may be spent elsewhere.
Gather Data as Much as Possible and Be Flexible
Data is not a one-off exercise. Collect as much data as possible in the early stages, but continue to collect data. Collect data not only on customer behavior and the customer lifecycle, but also general info via surveys, polls, etc. on your social media platforms and via email. The data you collect is a hugely important resource and offers you several benefits and potential uses.
Interpreting Data for Business Health
And it is, of course, not just about collecting data, but about analyzing it and interpreting it efficiently. Consider using one of the many tools, such as Google Analytics, to help you with this. Identify what metrics, such as KPIs, matter most to you. A good KPI helps show your business is healthy.
Understand the Market
Collecting and analyzing consumer data helps you understand how your ideal customers behave online. It helps define and segment particular demographics, gain a deeper understanding of customer needs, and identify opportunities for improvement throughout the customer lifecycle.
Better Marketing
By constantly collecting data, you get better insights into which of your marketing strategies and campaigns have worked well. The more data you have, the easier it is to identify which sorts of campaigns are best, and what platforms reach more of your ideal customer base and generate more leads.
Related Reading
• Klaviyo Alternatives
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Book a Call for a Free Action Plan | Get an ROI Guarantee or Your Money Back
Personalization is changing the game for eCommerce businesses. Customers want to feel special and have their individual needs met when they purchase online. eCommerce personalization builds on that by using data to create a shopping experience tailored to each customer’s interests and preferences.
Using Data to Drive Repeat Business
This data-driven method of customizing the online experience can significantly improve how customers navigate the eCommerce funnel and increase their likelihood of conversion. For example, with eCommerce personalization, you can:
Show customers products that suit their unique preferences
Remind them to reorder items they’ve purchased before
Offer discounts on these items to encourage a quick return to your site
Not only does this help to reduce bounce rates, but it also increases the likelihood of repeat purchases, which can drastically improve your eCommerce revenue.
Ground AI: The Future of eCommerce Personalization
You're testing ads, influencers, email and barely growing your DTC. What if, in 5 minutes and 1 line of code, you could add 20% growth instead? Ground AI is the leading AI revenue driver, helping brands grow impossibly fast with our eCommerce personalization platform.
The 20% Advantage
Brands using Ground grow, on average, 20% more a year. That’s $200K in extra revenue if you’re making $1M today! With Ground, you can automatically acquire more first-time customers, ensure you're converting as many bounced sales, and increase repeat purchase revenue (more cross-selling, replenishment, and subscriptions). Book a call for a free action plan and get an ROI guarantee or your money back.